Correspondence

Sir,

While working on the Imagist poets and their notions about how to read and write in images, I came across a passage by T. S. Eliot that might bear upon the question often raised about Jung's style of expressing his ideas in writing. (The wider and more precise relations between Imagism and Jung's psychology cannot be gone into here.)

A criticism of Jung's style is exemplified in these sentences from Fordham:

He moves from one topic to another not because there is a logical connexion but because there is an association either in his own mind or in the mind of his subject; indeed the apposition of two apparently unconnected ideas in a single text can be enough to assume a connexion between them. How far this sometimes went I may perhaps illustrate by a personal reminiscence. I could not make out any reason at all for a footnote in Psychology & alchemy and thought it might be removed. In my capacity as co-editor of the Collected works I asked Jung about it: ‘Oh, I just thought of it’, he said, and that was enough for it to be left in. (‘An evaluation of Jung's work’, Lecture No. 119, Guild of Pastoral Psychology, October, 1962.)

Aside from the possibility that Jung was pulling Fordham's leg, there is the possibility that Jung's style—especially for writing on imaginational materials such as alchemy—must proceed in the manner described by Fordham. This passage from Eliot may illustrate my point:

Any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppression of ‘links in the chain’, of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to incoherence or to love of cryptogram. The justification of such abbreviation or method is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one impression … The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced. Such selection of a sequence of images and ideas has nothing chaotic about it. There is a logic of the